


The Answer

by aban_asaara



Series: Shadows at Noontide [3]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Humor, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 20:12:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11539596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: Anders wants to know why in blazes is Hawke even with Fenris. The answer is simple.





	1. Chapter 1

It’d be a simple thing to answer Anders’s question, if Hawke didn’t know just _how_ he’d make light of it.

Fenris knows things. Many things, about most things. He tells her of Rivain, and Par Vollen and Seheron and Nevarra, of the Fog Warriors and the Fog Dancers, the Orlesian nobility and the Antivan royalty, the Black Divine and the magisterium and the Circle in Minrathous. He tells her of Ashkaari Koslun and enough of the Qun to untwist the contemptuous curl of the Arishok’s mouth when she addresses him. “You hear much when people regard you as little more than furniture,” Fenris replies when she asks how he even knows all that, but that’s just him, she thinks: had it been her, she would have wasted away in idle fantasy, not learned foreign tongues or woven together the web of Thedosian politics from fragments of conversations.

After a lifetime of casting spells first and asking questions later, though, now she tries to understand instead—and when Fenris starts helping himself to her books after learning to read faster than she did the rules of diamondback, she cracks one open of her own for the first time since Lothering.

( _Not_ a picture book and _not_ a book about dragons. And not _Hard in Hightown_ either, as far as Varric is concerned.)

Fenris never lies. He lied to Hadriana, if that can even be counted as such, but it’s because he broke his word that once that Hawke realises it’s only ever held true otherwise. Fenris only says what he means and always means what he says, and though his honesty has the sharp, serrated edges of rashvine nettle sometimes, once the welts have worn off she’s most often left having to admit that he has the truth of it—and when the entire Kirkwall nobility turns into lickspittles, trying to simper their way into the Champion’s good graces (or into her leathers), she comes to think of Fenris’s forthrightness as an uncut gem: perhaps not as pretty as a stone cut and set, but worth that much more.

Hawke, though? She’s—well, not a liar the way Varric is, but she skirts and shirks and twists the truth, maims and manhandles it, has perhaps even left it for dead a few times. At least with Fenris, though, truth comes to her a little easier.

(Anyway, she’d rather not suffer the smug look on his face whenever he pokes holes in her attempts at deceit.)

Fenris tempers her. With the city-wide revelation of her magic—now the Maker’s grace and not His curse—comes something that no title could ever match: the elation of being a known apostate yet untouchable, the unspeakable relief of the first breath after staying underwater a little too long, an intoxicating rush that she has to swim against lest it carry her too far from herself. It’s little things at first: her reveling in Cullen’s stammers and stutters, a casual mention of her magic to sway the nobles of the Keep her way, a misdirection hex cast to make some arsehole bumble off the pier for calling Merrill “knife ear.”

But when treading the line between freedom and excess becomes a balancing act worthy of an Antivan tightrope walker in the storm, when the line all but vanishes—then she has but to look at Fenris, branded with the hubris of mages, to be stirred away from the Void that sings to her.

(Alright—she can’t _quite_ keep herself from teasing Cullen just to watch his nug-wheel brain run.)

The answer to Anders’s question is simple: Fenris makes her a better woman—perhaps even a good woman, when she wouldn’t be otherwise. “By being the perfect example of what not to do?” Anders would say, though, and it’s not that she doesn’t _want_ to argue with him well into the next age—she just doesn’t have any breath left to waste when a certain elf keeps taking it away.

(She’d complain, but nowhere are her breaths, her heart and the truth of her answer safer than in Fenris’s hands, so she lets him have them.)

So—the sex, she jests instead. She’s with Fenris for the sex.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Saving for posterity this silly little thing that happened after someone on [tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/post/161571341796/the-answer) pointed out just how annoyed Anders would be:
>
>> “Psht, I could do whatever he could” with Isabella chiming in “Oh really? I’d like to see that”

“On the one hand, Anders has his electricity trick,” Isabela starts in an undertone, a dark glimmer under darker lashes, “ooh, but with Fenris … think of the _possibilities_. I bet he can ghost out of his clothes … do it _through_ his clothes … get his fingers in there without anyone noticing—perhaps he’s even doing it right now,” she teases, and the hand that Fenris rests on Hawke’s knee between sips of ale darts out from under the table, “or even _better_ yet, do it with his p—”

Anders cuts her off with a gesture. “We get the idea, thank you very much.”

“Can you—do that?” Hawke asks Fenris in a whisper once she’s done choking on the dregs of her pint. “Ghost out of your clothes? And—the rest?”

From above the cards fanned out in his hand, she only sees elf-ear tips of the brightest scarlet and mirth crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Perhaps tonight I’ll endeavour to find out,” he replies, and the thought sends a flush of warmth to Hawke’s face despite herself.

Isabela quaffs the rest of her ale, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, then winks at her, a devilish curve to her lips. “You’re welcome, sweet thing.”


End file.
